Reception: texts, readers, audiences, history

Table of Contents

• Editor’s Introduction

Essays:

• Kenneth M. Roemer, “They Talk, Who Listens: Audience in American Indian Literatures--The Erdrich Example”
• Jennifer Nolan-Stinson, “Toward a Life History of Reading”
• Olga Kuminova, “To See Across the Veil of Print: Virtual Re-personalization of the Reader-Author Relationship during the ‘Reading Revolution’”
• Charlotte Templin, “Americans Read Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing: Literary Criticism and Cultural Differences”
• Katherine Mack, “Public Memory as Contested Receptions of the Past”

Reviews:

• Bautz, Annika. The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott: A Comparative Longitudinal Study. London: Continuum, 2007. Review by Patricia Harkin
• Blaak, Jeroen. Literacy in Everyday Life: Reading and Writing in Early Modern Dutch Diaries. Trans. Beverley Jackson. Brill: Leiden and Boston, 2009. Review by Olga Kuminova
• Brown, Matthew P. The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007. Review by Paul Dahlgren
• Frazier, Melissa. Romantic Encounters: Writers, Readers, and the Library for Reading. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2007. Review by Stephanie Lynn Carlson
• Haskin, Dayton. John Donne in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Review by Joseph Sullivan
• Kallendorf, Craig. The Other Virgil: “Pessimistic” Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Review by Ika Willis
• Loveman, Kate. Reading Fictions, 1660-1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Review by Marta Kvande
• Robertson, Michael. Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. Review by Jennifer L. Brady
• Rubin, Joan Shelley. Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2007. Review by Shannon L. Thomas
• Wakelin, Daniel. Humanism, Reading, & English Literature 1430-1530. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Review by Mark Amsler
• Willes, Margaret. Reading Matters: Five Centuries of Discovering Books. New Haven: Yale UP, 2008. Review by Cecilia Konchar Farr

Contributors:

1. Olga Kuminova is a postdoctoral researcher at the Foreign Literatures and Linguistics Department of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, under the guidance of Prof. Barbara Hochman. The working title of the research project is “From Reader-Author Companionship to the Birth of Fan Mail in the United States, 1840-1880.” Following the completion of her PhD in 2009, she has been working as a teaching associate at the Ben-Gurion University and Kaye College for Education, Beer Sheva, teaching literature and academic writing in English, and running a small business for academic writing support.

2. Katherine Mack is an assistant professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Colorado Springs, Colorado. She is currently working on her monograph, A Generative Failure: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. Her essays have appeared in the journal WPA as well as the edited collections Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts and Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age.

3. Jennifer Nolan-Stinson is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of English at North Carolina State University. She is currently working on a monograph about twentieth- and twenty-first-century American reading practices based on her ethnographic research and has recently begun a new project exploring the intersections between consumption, design, and marketing of paperback books.

4. Kenneth M. Roemer is a Distinguished Teaching and Distinguished Scholar Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. He has published four books on utopian literature, including The Obsolete Necessity (1976) and Utopian Audiences (2003) and three on American Indian Literatures, including the co-edited Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (2005).

5. Charlotte Templin is Professor of English at the University of Indianapolis. She has published numerous articles on the reception of modern American and Canadian women writers and is the author of Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation.

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